Anne and Yves first opened their home to one of our guests in 2018 – an Iranian man who was picked up by the coastguard when his boat capsized. Since then, they’ve hosted 24 refugees and people seeking asylum, at one point having eight Ukrainian guests staying with them at the same time.

Yves said: “For us it’s a natural thing to do; we have a big family – four children and 10 grandchildren – but they’ve all moved on, and it does feel wrong to have all of these empty rooms when you know that there are people homeless in the street.”

Some of their Ukrainian guests were with them during the Christmas period last year, and Anne and Yves were more than happy to involve them in the celebrations.

Anne said: “They had four kids and so we decorated the house, made an advent calendar, and went together to get a Christmas tree. It was a very happy time, certainly for the children which was nice, considering what was going on in their country.”

Both Ukrainian families stayed in the couple’s home in rural Gloucestershire, but Anne and Yves weren’t the only ones looking out for them:

“Our whole village took part,” said Anne. “Somebody gave them a huge turkey and they were invited to sing a Christmas song in the church. They weren’t just part of our family, but of the whole community as well, which was very nice.”

Although the couple are some of our most frequent hosts, they were initially hesitant to get involved:

“It started with a friend of ours, a French Jewish lady married to an American man,” said Yves. “She emailed us to say they were hosting a Syrian refugee and that it was changing their lives and they’d like to talk to us about it. This was at the time of ISIS and war in Iraq, so I rang her immediately and I said: ‘You must be out of your mind, you are a Jewish family and you’re taking a Muslim person you don’t know into your house, you cannot be serious!’”

“I invited her for lunch to try and talk her out of hosting, but in the end, she talked us into doing it as well!”

Despite Yves’ fears, the couple’s experience with their 24 guests has been uniformly positive: “We never had any problems with our guests,” said Anne. “They’ve all been really nice, polite, very grateful and a lot of them became real friends. We still see some of them on a regular basis.”

“You hear a lot about different cultures but hosting breaks down barriers and helps you realise how similar everyone is: our guests have all been really nice people and they just want to be safe.”

Yves agrees: “That’s the amazing thing – you would expect that if you take a sample of 24 random human beings, most of the time you might not get on with half a dozen of them. That never happened to us – we had only the most charming, discreet, helpful guests.”

“You meet lots of fascinating people, and I’m always aware of the fact that one day something similar could happen to my children and grandchildren and they’ll end up in need of shelter, and I would very much like somebody to open their door and take them in. If nobody does that for anybody else, then it’s a pretty hopeless world that we live in.”

More stories